This week’s FSTA summer conference presented a stronger set of elevator pitches than we saw at the winter conference in Vegas, but the winner wasn’t a surprise.
FightMetric hit the stage with a well-planned, simple-to-follow presentation and a comfortable, confident presenter in Alon Cohen.
The company focuses on the collection and dispersal of statistics for mixed martial arts and related to the crowd that it had recently signed on as the official stat provider for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
There’s no denying the explosion in popularity over the past few years for MMA, so it’s no stretch to think of fantasy MMA as an area with enticing growth potential. That, no doubt, is the key reason that FightMetric pitched to fantasy folks on Wednesday afternoon, and the company seemed to draw the desired result.
The other participants, who still were able to get their word out to the crowd:
FantasyPro.com — This new site that doesn’t appear to be live yet on the Web will allow fantasy teams to compete against those outside its league. The creators are seeking deals with existing league-hosting sites to enable integration and will not host its own leagues. Users will be able to challenge others via the Fantasy Pro platform in free or pay games and take part in games put on by the site itself.
Fantasy Sports 4 Kids — As a slightly emotional Brian Riggs told the group, this is not a new site seeking to host kids fantasy games; it’s a much more worthy outlet. FS4Kids, which currently lives online only as a blog, will seek to connect fantasy leagues with charities, while also spotlighting the good works of children’s charities and NFL players who have helped children. Participants will enter their league fees like in your normal pay league, but the winners will be able to put their prizes toward charities that will be easier to locate via this community. Riggs told us that the idea was borne from his own daughter’s fight with cancer (it’s in remission) and that he already had 126 leagues interested. Here’s hoping the concept comes together well.
Pickemfirst — Alain de Raynal had presented to the FSTA crowd previously (and won the pitch session), but this time he came with his company’s newer concept: the blog aggregator. Whereas the initial application enabled fantasy players to quickly check on a player’s availability in multiple leagues while reading online content, the new aggregator pulls in articles via RSS feeds and presents them via popup window when you encounter particular player names in Web content. For example, de Raynal showed us an article in which he came across Diamondbacks pitcher Edwin Jackson. The Pickemfirst blog aggregator showed the three most recent article mentioning Jackson from three differen online outlets. Anyone interested in being included needs only to give Pickemfirst the OK to pull material.
RosterSlots.com — FSB.com previously presented a full writeup on RosterSlots, so here’s just a quick summary. It’s a fantasy baseball game (which also treated the Olympics in February) that plays like a slot machine, incorporating enough trades and player decisions (plus no cash involved) to steer clear of gambling.
WaiverWire.com — Another veteran of the elevator-pitch session, WaiverWire.com’s primary pursuit is a tool built on Wall Street analytics that serves as a virtual assistant coach throughout the season, crunching all the pertinent numbers to help you make lineup and player-movement decisions. New for this year was a revenue-sharing model for fantasy sites interested in a partnership.
Fantazzle — Ryan Parr’s site does its primary business in short-window fantasy games, but his pitch focused more on his white-label offerings. Fantazzle presents various options for games that can carry the hosts brand as well interesting in-game advertising potential, such as positioning logos on virtual race cars for a NASCAR game.
PASPN.net – Probably the most serious of fantasy platforms that we’ve yet come across, the NBA GM game at the center of Ngozika Nwaneri’s online community involves year-round attention to your basketball franchise. It allows consumers to play as either general manager or player agent, each side having to deal with the other in various personnel situations.
TodayInFantasy.com – The latest Footballguys online entry wants to be Google for fantasy football (and eventually other sports as well). For more information, reach the recent FSB.com story.
Advanced Sports Logic — Welcome to The Machine. Frankly, I’m not sure I could properly explain this, so here’s what the site says: “Our patent-pending ProbulatorTM technology … uses the variance and accuracy of player projections to simulate your entire fantasy football season with powerful probability distributions.” It’s another tool for making stat-based recommendations throughout the year to help your fantasy football team.
Fantasy Judgment – Michael A. Stein is the latest lawyer to launch a site for fantasy dispute resolution. In addition to offering a single-use package and full-season option, Stein is in the market for partnerships with league-hosting sites to provides his services to users.
A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.
